


Sylvanus' To-Do List (Or, A Repair-Dragon Laments)

by MSaga



Category: Flight Rising
Genre: Gen, Only sane man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:15:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23070787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MSaga/pseuds/MSaga
Summary: Sylvanus is responsible for ensuring things run smoothly around the Cathedral. Given the strange characters who live there, that's rarely an easy task.
Relationships: None
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

To-Do List:  
1\. Fix broken window in Astronomy Tower (remind the ice-witch unexpected results are no reason to damage innocent windows.)

2\. Help Ulxete repair lightning collectors atop Nerd Lair.(Beg those morons to stop insulting the gods so often. I don't care how silly their 'laws' are, this is the second time this week the collectors have overloaded.)

3\. Figure out some way to patch up Pond's tower. (Place is falling apart. Stick one stone back on, five more fall off. Next month's council I'm bringing it up again. If they want her to stay away, they can at least give her somewhere decent to do it in.)

4\. Ask the Zamadi to send out someone for metal scavenging, specifically iron, copper, steel, whatever those crazies in the volcano use to make their engines, collector fluid, etc.

5\. Figure out where next play will be held. Merrie wants to modify a Second Age play called... Faust? (look it up. Merrie will give me such a look if I get it wrong.) and the sets sound like they need a lot of space. The Courtyard? The Great Hall? Check floor plan. Maybe a cellar?

6\. Consider implications of asking Aerope to help...fix(?) (find better term for Convention work) the Mindbender's focus orbs. At least that's something they'll never ask me to fix.

7\. Sleep? No, not enough time...


	2. Fix Broken Window in Astronomy Tower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Or, Remind the Ice-Witch Unexpected Results are No Reason to Damage Innocent Windows._

Sylvanus’ morning started at 5, with a scream and a crash.

He bolted out to the plaza to find two shaking workers clutching at each other and a smashed astromancy orb a few feet from their claws. Loud cursing descended from on high as the last few stars disappeared into the dawn.

Sylvanus went to get a replacement window. After all, there was only one dragon in the cathedral who lived up that high and would have any use for astromancy, and the she-witch never bothered to open her windows before having her fits of fury, like any sensible dragon would do.

Glass acquired, he trekked back towards the library to see one of his helpers, Myrn, busily pushing the broken fragments to one side of the plaza for him to deal with later. Aerope was doing his best to prevent that from happening, creating light gusts of wind to make sparklingly sharp falls of glass and magic.

Sylvanus kept on, making a mental note to talk to Aerope later about the latest plan of his… theater group. 

He trudged into the Library to see Scriptae just sitting down at her desk, hot cup of tea and latest book in her claws.

“Morning,” she called.

He grunted and continued on to the long winding stairs that rose into the Astronomer’s Tower, held by the Ice dragon sect led by the damned she-witch. Coming to a landing, he paused to rest and wait for the usual challenge. 

“Halt!”

And there it was.

“Ahh, Mynm, morning.”

“State your name, rank, and business in this tower!”

“Sylvanus, repair dragon, and there’s no way you missed that crash if I could hear it from the dorms.”

“Business in this tower!”

Oh, right. If Mynm ever had a sense of humor (or sarcasm), it had been frozen, surgically removed, and presented to the she-witch as a gift ages ago.

“Window repair.”

“There have been no requests sent out for a repair dragon. You are not allowed in unless one is provided.”

Also a stickler for rules to the point where common sense did not matter. Needless to say, not the favorite dragon of certain hard-working repair dragons who just climbed up a truly ridiculous amount of stairs to deliver a new window to the Grand Sheba of Wastefulness at not-worth-it-o’clock in the morning. 

“Then please send someone to go ask her if she would like a new window. I’ll stay here, weighted down by this rather heavy chunk of glass, with you to watch me, until they return. How’s that?”

Mynm went into a rapid whispered conversation with his associate, a seer Sylvanus recognized as Draint. Nothing too special about her, she was probably keeping Mynm company until her shift at the Scrying Center began.

Eventually, she pulled out an odd looking plant, likely one of her familiars, and it ran a tendril sharply up the stairs. All three waited a short time before it returned to shouts of,

“YES, FINE, IT DOESN’T MATTER ANYWAYS!”

With that, Mynm moved out of Sylvanus’ path, and he resumed his trek upwards.

Finally, seemingly an eternity later, he reached the highest room in the Tower.

It was cluttered with astronomical charts, walking telescopes skittered across the icy floor, getting underfoot. A few with cracked lenses lay bandaged in a corner, healing up from banging into the walls. In the center of the room, slumped over a crowded desk positioned just below the largest of several telescopes pointed through the roof, was Mneymnosene. A rather slight Snapper, her purplish scales had a constant coating of frost from the freezing altitudes at which she lived, and her personal Astrolabe constantly floated at her side.

Right now, however, it flitted about in a worried fashion, nudging at her here and there to try and get her up and moving.

She, however, looked as though she planned to stay where she was until the Void swallowed them all.

Oh well. Not like it was his problem. He asked,

“Which one this time?”

And she mournfully pointed a claw in the direction of what had once been a large, angled window with a nice view over the plaza. Now it had a few chunks of shattered glass left in the frame, and the icy breezes whipping through. Easy enough for him to fix, though.

As he went to work, she groaned.  
When he didn’t respond, she moaned louder.  
The third time he nearly dropped the window, and set it down carefully before whipping around and demanding,

“What? What do you want? I’m busy!”

She replied,

“The angles didn’t work. I spent two month calculating angles for last night’s moonrise, and they were so wrong, the calculations from them said the path started in Constellation Hydra! So, I know they’re wrong, but I don’t know where or how. I can’t fix anything if I don’t know where to start! Two months of work, down the drain.”

Sylvanus, half listening as he fitted the glass properly into the now cleared frame, nodded and muttered,

“Down the drain, yep.”

before stepping back and checking his work, then beginning to apply the sealant.

“My calculations look fine, I know my maps are accurate, and historical charts agree the path has gone nowhere near the Hydra since the Second Age, so all that leaves is my equipment. Or maybe I just can’t see my calculation error! But, I had Ceo and Mynr look it over, and while they certainly are no experts on Astromancy, they both agreed my equations make sense. So if my equipment is the only thing left, I’ve got to check every inch of this thing”

She gestured to the large telescope,

“And probably dismantle half the tower along with it, so you’ll just come back up here to yell at me and nothing will change for three straight months!”

Sylvanus finished and gave a grunt of approval before turning back to the Ice-witch and beginning a rant of his own.

“First of all, quit damaging the damn Tower! The next time you break a window like this, I won’t repair it for a month, and we both know by then everything in here will be frozen solid. Secondly, if I hear about you taking apart this Tower without approval from the Repair Dragons, we’re going to have a problem. Do you want to collapse the Library? Because at the rate you’re going, I’d swear that’s your goal. Anyways, what do you mean, three months? It’s one telescope. You’ve got plenty more up here. There are lenses everywhere, and we both know you’re an expert Ice Mage. Magic up a telescope!”

“It doesn’t work like-“

“No interrupting! So two months of work failed. So what? Determine what went wrong, fix it, and move on."

"Don’t you dare destroy this place again without consulting me. I’m warning you.”

With that, he stomped out, leaving in his wake a shocked Ice-Witch and a fixed-up window.


	3. Help Ulxete repair lightning collectors atop Nerd Lair.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Or, Beg Those Morons to Stop Insulting the Gods So Often._
> 
> I don't care how silly their 'laws' are, this is the second time this week the collectors have overloaded...

Ulxete looked even more placid than usual, mouthguard loose around her neck and rubber gloves rolled up to her elbows. None of this added up to anything good in his experience.

“Sir, something must be done about them, or I’ll kill them myself.”

Ah. Confirmation. Nothing good ever came of him being right. 

“They weren’t even holding a ritual last night and we still lost three spires. That makes twelve already this month, and if I didn’t have scrap left from the last set we lost, we’d be down half a field. This is patchwork, sir, and we can’t collect even a third of the strikes with patchwork.”

She looked expectant.

Sylvanus mentally wished for the day to be over already and asked,

“What did they say when you tried talking to them about it?”

“I’m not sure they even heard me. I spoke to Creligo for nearly half an hour about all the problems with their rituals and the overload on the power collectors, and at the end of it, all she did was nod, agree absentmindedly, then immediately ask my opinion on an entirely incomprehensible string of runic equation statements. I was stuck there for two hours, and another half-capacitor failed in that time.  
Sir, I cannot keep up with this.”

Ulxete appeared closest to emotion she had been throughout the conversation, exasperated anger filtering through her tone.

“If I could get them to slow it down to once every two weeks, then I’d be able to prep the spires for the overload beforehand.” 

Her weariness was palpable, and reminded Sylvanus she’d been posted to the Spires for half a year now. 

Even someone as dedicated as Ulxete would lose the energy to continue a losing cause without some respite. 

“There’s no chance they will go for that. Could you do once per week?”

“Barely. But anything's better than the schedule of whenever it pops into their heads.”

“Alright. I’ll try to talk to them at the general meeting tomorrow, but no promises.” 

He turned to leave, and she called after him,

“Fine, but if nothing changes, I refuse to keep bailing out a place where the captain shoots holes in their own ship just to see what will happen.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I'm posting the chapters out of order.


End file.
